The Best of vForum 2011 awards: A roundup

This October witnessed many tough calls for SearchDataCenter.in Staff, with everyone caught up in The Best of vForum 2011 awards’ evaluation processes. The pressure intensified further, as nominations poured in for these awards. It is difficult when one has to choose winners from among elites in India when it comes to virtualization, cloud computing and IT as a Service.

The awards were divided into three categories – Innovation Excellence, Outstanding Business Value and IT as a Service leadership. Here’s a look at what each of these categories represent.

Innovation Excellence

The Innovation Excellence category honors organizations that innovatively use VMware’s technology to reap several business benefits. Innovation can be in the deployment of cloud computing or virtualization initiatives. Deployment of virtualized desktop infrastructure (VDI), business continuity solutions and business critical application modernization were among the various projects that vied for this award.

Outstanding Business Value

This category recognizes achievements of organizations that realize significant return on investment (ROI) on its virtualization or cloud computing projects. Better ROI could have been achieved through cost savings, new business opportunities, revenue growth, better service delivery, or overall efficiency and agility improvements.

IT as a Service Leadership

Through this award, TechTarget recognizes the efforts of organizations that deploy virtualization and cloud computing initiatives with exceptional maturity and sophistication. Businesses with private cloud, hybrid cloud strategy or employed virtualization to revolutionize IT service delivery within their companies are eligible for nominations to this award.

The champions

The Jury Panel consisting of Kersi Tavadia, Chief Information Office (CIO) Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE) Limited, T. Srinivasan, Managing Director, VMware India & SAARC and Anil Patrick R, Chief Editor, TechTarget India had a difficult time selecting the winners. After a multi-stage evaluation process, the panel zeroed in on the following businesses as the award winners in each of the categories.

• Usha International Ltd bagged the Innovation Excellence award for server consolidation project. The project involves virtualization of its business critical applications such as SAP add-on modules for BI/BO, APO and SCM on virtual servers. A detailed case study highlighting Usha International’s project will be featured on SearchDataCenter.in soon.
• HDFC Bank was honored with the Outstanding Business Value award, to recognize the savings it achieved through successful server consolidation deployment. The bank is now able to rapidly rollout branch offices, as well as accrue significant operational and cost benefits. Do check back soon on SearchDataCenter.in for a detailed look at this outstanding project.
• Shoppers Stop received the IT as a Service Leadership award which allows it to provide compute resources on demand to its multiple business units. Shoppers Stop has capabilities like efficient micro partitioning, CPU and memory allocation, along with dynamic resource allocation enabled for optimized performance of application, according to business cycles. We will be shortly featuring this success story.

Now that you are familiar with the award winners, it’s time for a pictorial tour of this year’s VMware vForum 2011 held on November 1st in Mumbai. Here’s our view of what transpired at the event.

Vignettes from VMware vForum 2011